They Can't Scrub The Truth

 Richardson lays out efforts by the Trumpists to somehow erase non-White history from things like the Defense Department website. Reading it, I'm struck by how profoundly dumb those efforts are. While Trump has largely cowed some college administrators - looking at you, Columbia - there are few avenues for controlling the "Academy." I don't see an Orwellian future for intellectual life, providing we have free and fair elections in 2026. As Marshall notes, authoritarianism is hard in a federal system, with so many separate nodes of sovereignty.

Let's take the economy as an example of separate nodes of sovereignty. As Krugman catalogs, consumer confidence is cratering, even with general mixed economic news. What's more, Bessent and other administration figures are trying to prime the public for a recession. That's...odd. One interesting perhaps leading indicator is a steep collapse in people eating in restaurants. That suggests a pulling back on "luxury" spending in favor of personal autonomy.

If that's what's happening - broad scale pulling back from spending in an unstable economic environment - then we should expect to see a sort of self-fulfilling cycle of reduced spending>reduced hiring/investment>reduced spending>reduced hiring/investment. That's the cycle of a recession. If people aren't spending because they think the economy is bad, then the economy will be bad. (On a separate note, AOC is working on capping credit card interest rates at 10%. That strikes me as either a really bad idea because it will help tip us into a collapse in demand that will lead to a recession or a really good idea because it will help tip us into a collapse in demand that will lead to a recession.)

I get why people get fired up by Trump's efforts to expunge the military service of people who aren't white guys. It's outrageous. It's supposed to be outrageous. It's the actions - ignoring court orders, illegally impounding funds, DOGE's evisceration of agencies without legal cover - that are bad. I think there's always been an assumption that Trump is completely immune to the laws of political gravity. That's the lesson of 2016 and 2024. It is not the lesson of 2018, 2020 or 2022. 

The reason Bessent is priming people for a recession is that Trump is going to cause a recession. They think they can control that narrative and shape the facts. I have very serious doubts about that.